Another day, another "buzz marketing" product. Marketing group Creston recently announced a product called "Sway" that monitors blogs, social nets, forums and reviews to track what consumers are saying about brands. Nothing too new in that. But note the name - sway.

There are legion sites and tools out there that allow you to search and then track keywords and brands.

Creston has cleverly identified the neuroses of many corporations who recognise that the internet is a vast, untamable wild west of opinion and information where brands are made and lost - but aren't quite sure what to do about it.

Kryptonite is generally agreed, to date, to hold the mantle for worst blog PR disaster even if it says it did act on the crisis. The bike lock manufacturer didn't engage quickly enough when bloggers started showing how the super-tough lock could be opened using a Biro case.

It's not surprising that companies are desperate to try and work out just how to "control" their message online, and I can imagine rapidly-greying marketing executives willingly pouring their money at something like this to make it look like they are doing something.

Eavesdrop on the online conversation

The first part of the Creston offering is tracking what's being said about brands on blogs, social networks, forums and reviews. Technically, the way information is propagated on these different formats is so different that what we're talking about here is data from a bunch of different online measuring tools brought together manually.

Part deux of the Creston offering is the creation of a "digital map" that helps brands work out how to maximise the profile of their brand by interacting with the community.

Nicholas Jeffery, Creston's director of influence, told me that the service will act like a funnel for the huge amount of information available online. It takes all that information and filters out the most relevant parts of the conversation for each brand. What makes Sway different from existing products is, he says, that it uses information from those four web platforms, rather than just one or two sources.

"We eavesdrop on the conversation, and then impart that public domain information to clients in a structured way. It's important not only to collect that information but to influence the conversation."

He described the web like a pub. As well as the loud people that dominate the discussion, there are plenty of lurkers interested in the conversation and it's important to reach those too.

Weighting favourable reviews

He gave the example of Jeremy Clarkson slating a car brand, and said the brand couldn't do much about that apart from post something on its own site. But he said if it could identify customers that are writing favourable things about the car, the company could try to promote that. It could make sure that the sites use the same metatags, Jeffery said, so that when a consumer searches for that model they'd bring up both the official site and a review on the blog.

I did point out that those results would not then, of course, objective because they'd be weighted in the car company's favour.

So if the point of this is to "sway" the online conversation in the brand's favour, does that make the internet a less objective place for consumers? And what will that do for online trust?

"Brands definitely need to be transparent. It would take away from the credibility of their own site if they weren't," said Jeffery.

"We're seeing a new era of customer service here and brands need to take note."

He also mentioned Bernard Matthews as an example of a brand that could do with some positive brand management online right now, and said brands have to act really quickly to limit damage to their credibility.

Creston's two-part monitoring and profile-raising package costs somewhere in the region of £30-40,000, though a full corporate blog strategy would be extra.

A code of conduct for bloggers

I talked to Paul Walsh, chair of the British Interactive Marketing Association, about these kind of buzz monitoring products, the rise of "try-vertising" and the "independence" of bloggers who benefit from corporate freebies and trials.

Walsh is in the process of developing a code of conduct for blogs which would cover just these kind of practices.

"How do you know when you read something on a blog whether it's saying something good or bad? What do you know about the people that have written it? It could be a rival writing something to undermine someone else's product."

He said that a code of conduct would help to iron out any companies acting unethically, but that with the continued growth in blogging and e-commerce and with increasing links between the two, things are likely to get worse before they get better.

"Companies have to be careful not to manipulate the conversation in an underhanded way."

Reevoo

• Another problem creates another opportunity, neatly filled on this occasion by Reevoo. This is an independent site that publishes reviews on products. Reevoo ("rev-iew", get it?) sends customers on affiliate retail sites a questionnaire when they buy something, and then those reviews are aggregated on the site.

MSN tech & gadgets channel

• My brother and I once decided that the collective noun for geeks would probably be a LAN, but people in glass houses...

•The kids' TV network said today that traffic to Turbonick, its UK gaming and video player, has increased 346% month-on-month to more than 447,000 streams during January 2007. This is basically a video-on-demand service for children's content and includes exclusive episodes of including Aardman's Purple and Brown, and the Jamie Lynn Spears series Zoey 101. The site also offers a free game each week (SpongeBob SquarePants included) and credits the increase in traffic to a site-wide campaign.